Delta Sharing Fundamentals

1. Delta Sharing fundamentals

What happens when you need to share data outside your organization? Delta Sharing lets you share live data without copying it.

2. The data sharing problem

Most organizations share data the old-fashioned way. Export a CSV, upload it to a shared drive, send an email with a link. The problem? The data is stale the moment it's exported. The recipient makes a copy, then another team makes a copy of that copy. Soon there are five versions floating around and nobody knows which one is current. You've also lost control - once that file leaves your environment, you can't revoke access or audit who's reading it.

3. What is Delta Sharing?

Delta Sharing flips this model. Instead of exporting a copy, you create a share - a named collection of tables - and grant a recipient access to read the data live. The recipient queries your data in real time through the Delta Sharing protocol. There are no copies, no exports, no stale files. When you update the underlying table, the recipient sees the latest version automatically. And if the relationship ends, you revoke access and they lose it immediately.

4. Creating a share

Setting up a share takes just a couple of SQL commands. You create a named share, then add tables to it. In practice, you'll almost always share gold layer tables - clean, aggregated data that's ready for consumption. There's no reason to share raw bronze data with a partner. The share acts as a curated window into your lakehouse, showing exactly the data you want to expose and nothing more.

5. Adding recipients

Next, you create a recipient - a named entity representing the external organization. When you create a recipient, Databricks generates an activation link. You send that link to your partner, they use it to configure their client, and from that point they can query the shared tables. You can have multiple recipients per share, and each recipient only sees the shares you've explicitly granted them access to. Revoking is just as simple - drop the grant and the access disappears.

6. The library card analogy

Here's the simplest way to think about it. Traditional sharing is like photocopying a book and mailing it. The recipient gets a snapshot that's outdated before it arrives. Delta Sharing is like issuing a library card - the recipient comes to your library and reads the original. They always see the latest edition. And if they stop being a patron, you cancel the card and they can't get in. No copies, no stale data, full control.

7. Summary

To recap: Delta Sharing lets you share data without copying it. You create a share, add your gold-layer tables, and grant access to external recipients. They read the data live through the Delta Sharing protocol, always seeing the latest version. And you retain full control - revoke access at any time with a single command. In the next lesson, we'll look at the two different types of Delta Sharing and when to use each.

8. Let's practice!

Let's put this into action. You'll create a share, add a table, and set up a recipient in Unity Catalog.

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